Pirate Bay trial ends, verdict due in April

Today marked the final day in the trial against The Pirate Bay, with lawyers for both the prosecution and defense delivering their closing arguments before a final verdict is given. The four men behind the site are accused of promoting copyright infringement and profiting from ad revenue, which, if upheld by the court, could cost them a year behind bars plus up to $180,000 in fines.

The defense however repeatedly argued that The Pirate Bay itself hosted no copyrighted files, but is rather a search engine and repository for users uploads. They also argued that the very Internet infrastructure was at issue in the case, with all sorts of sites and services that are completely legal  such as Google  link to at least some infringing content. In fact, you can even use Google to search for torrent files.

While this is certainly true, prosecutors maintain that unlike the aforementioned services, nearly all of The Pirate Bays popular downloads are in fact illegal and thus the defenses arguments are not valid  oddly enough they offered no details on the ratio of legal to illegal content on the site. The court announced a verdict would be due on 17 April. Meanwhile, the defense seems pretty confident on a positive outcome saying a guilty verdict would be a huge mistake for the future of the Internet.